There was a touch of panic under his voice at the thought of being a captive again. Madoc turned his head and pressed a bloody kiss against Took’s palm. “No,” he promised.
Lawrence grimaced at them both and pulled away. She started to scramble to her feet, but a bullet punched into the ground next to her and made her drop reluctantly back onto her knees.
“How did they even do this?” she demanded in frustration. “I saw Madoc fight these bastards on the road. Even if they are stronger, he could have beat them if he hadn’t lain down and given up. The three of you should have made short work of them. Pally alone—”
Took grimaced. “We nearly did, but—”
“Like I told him,” Sheriff Anderson interrupted as he walked into the room, one hand wrapped around the thin arm of a scruffy little girl. From her age and the faded red in her hair, it was Augusta Aron. There was blood on his shirt and lips, a gory tint that he licked eagerly and absently at. “We need the children, but we don’t need all the children. All it took was a demonstration, and your friends saw the error of their ways.”
He pointed with his gun toward a gory halo of blood and hair painted onto the wall. Something was crumpled at the bottom of the wall, roughly covered by the jackets and shirts of the other children, but Madoc tried not to look at that.
“Brave man,” Madoc said. “To kill children.”
“He was a sacrifice,” Anderson said. He shoved the little girl into another guard’s hands and wiped with sudden fastidiousness at the blood on his uniform shirt. “We’ve all sacrificed, cardinal. Every Proverbial family that lost a child. Every parent who took one of these undead cuckoos into the nest to raise. Generations of sacrifice.”
“Why?” Took asked.
Anderson glowered him. “I wasn’t talking to you, wetmouth,” he spat as he took a quick step across the floor. There was contempt in his voice, but he couldn’t hide the flash of envious satisfaction as he pistol whipped Took to the ground. “This was a conversation between equals.”
Was it? Madoc swallowed the gritty blood in his mouth and stared at Anderson. Dhampir darkened in the sun and faded in the dark. If they’d locked Madoc up long enough before they killed him, that first time, he’d have been as pale as the little ghost child under guard back in Charleston. He’d never seen one of them so dark they were weathered. Of course, he’d never seen one of them grow old.
“Did they steal you from Europe too?” he asked.
“Rescued,” Anderson corrected him as he turned to look at him. “My parents saved me, raised me in the Church, beat the devil out of me.”
“Made a Hunter out of you,” Madoc said.
Anderson smiled like that was a compliment to his parents’ childrearing skills.
That had happened in the old days. Dhampir were perfect Hunters if you raised them right—strong, dangerous, and most Anakim had an instinctive reluctance to hurt them. VINE never imagined it would be a problem over here. Dhampir were always rare—Anakim reproduced with their bite ten times as often as with childbirth, at least—but even more so in America. It had taken two hundred years for the first dhampir to be born on this continent. Either the long trip over the salt sea had rendered them generationally infertile or it was something in the air of their unfriendly new home. Either way, no one had been likely to lose track of one of their rare children.
It hadn’t occurred to anyone that Hunters would import them from Europe.
“That isn’t what you’re doing with these kids, though,” Took said as he pushed himself up onto his elbows. Blood poured from the split in his forehead. “Matthew was practically an adult when you kidnapped him to replace the children Waring rescued—”
“Stole,” Anderson corrected flatly as he avoided looking at Took.
Madoc spat out half a tooth—maybe Thomas could make his wife a ring out of it—and looked Anderson over. He remembered the church pew under his ass when he was a child, the preacher’s finger jabbed his way as the mean old bastard held him up as an example of sin, the children who wouldn’t play with him, his lover who never really thought he had a soul and had turned on him all too easily. It had nearly ruined him.
What would that be like for a whole, long life of drymouthed “sacrifice”?
“How much did they hate you?” Madoc asked.
Anderson stared at him for a second and then grimaced and took a step back. “I raised myself above them,” he said. “I took secret pride in how strong I was, how much they needed me. They knew that. That’s when I realized that I had another sacrifice to make.”
“He killed his son,” Annabelle blurted from where she hunched against the wall. “Fed his grandson nightshade and bloodmeal from vampires, cut his wrists and bled him into buckets that they all drank from. So they’d be strong and fast. Like him. Like us. Over and over again until Garrett couldn’t, didn’t wanna, come back.”
Anderson turned and pointed his gun at her. “We purified him. His soul was finally clean and it went to heaven.”
The threat of the gun didn’t have any effect on Annabelle. She spat at him, a wet gobbet of defiance that caught on his sleeve. “You raised us like cattle, told us you loved us, and ground our blood in your tea. Called it alchemy. If God hates us so much, why do you all want to be like us?”
Anderson swung the gun to point at the boy next to Annabelle. He rested his finger on the trigger and hissed, “Shut up.”
This time the threat worked.
His deputy stepped forward, her eyes bright with admiration that came close to worship as she looked at the sheriff. “We’ll change everything. The vampires won’t be able to flout their strength, their long lives, over us anymore. We will be equals, and then you’ll all learn your place.”
Crouched on the floor next to her son, Heather piped up. “And we can leave now?” she said. “We have nothing to do with this. My husband would support you. Our family has always had Hunter sympathies. We’ve donated to the cause.”
